Wednesday, December 7, 2011

780. The 1.5-year-old cat started spraying his urine is under the scalpel today

Wednesday morning.

A mother and her teenaged daughter rushed in with an older male cat for neuter. An "orange" cat that resembled the other one I wrote about last time. The same colour. That one bit the mother's hand while the mother was preventing him from the stray cat.

As time is precious to Singaporeans, I told the mum to go to Toa Payoh Hub with her daughter (school holidays) for one hour and come back instead of going home and come back again. She lived in Simei which is around a 30-minute drive away. "There are other clinics nearby your condo," I said. For some reason, she preferred Toa Payoh Vets and I was quite surprised.

"319074" was the postal code I had given to her when her daughter phoned the Surgery for the "pin number" as her driver mother could not locate my surgery. Nowadays, it is so easy if you have the GPS to locate places.

ANAESTHESIA
Weight: 5 kg
Xylazine 0.15ml + Ketamine 0.6 ml = 0.7 ml IM in one syringe.
Waited 10 minutes. Needed isoflurane gas 5% top up for less than 30 seconds. This shows that the dosage is a bit low for 5-kg cat. Should be xylazine 0.2 ml + Ketamine 0.8 ml without the need of topping up with isoflurane gas.

I ensured that whole scrotal and surrounding area has been plucked clean by Min and showed him how it could be done. Cleaned up scrotal area. Horizontal cut exposed two testicles. Removed them. Washed away the blood. When the owner came 2 hours later, the horizontal would appears to close together, so no bleeding or wound is seen. I asked Nicole to take a video and to record oral instructions of post-neuter care for video production. Hope this will turn out very interesting.

I asked my assistant Nicole to take some pictures to prepare a video on how to care for the cat after neutering. I had a rare case of a male cat's scrotal wound not healing some 14 days after neuter by Vet 1. So, these two cases would be able to illustrate the educational video on "post op care after neutering."

"You need to be a good story teller to connect with the audience viewing your video," I said to Nicole. "A good story is usually one where the viewer wants to know what's happen to the protagonist. For example, the video of FIV in a stray cat done by the two Temasek Polytechnic Vet Tech students. Do you find it engaging?"

"Yes," she said.
"Now, if you produce a video of 100 FIV cats with all their diseases, would that make it an interesting education video on FIV in cats?"
"No," she agreed.
"Similarly for the video on Caesarean sections produced by you for the 'Responsible Pet Ownership' video. There is no connection showing many picures of the dog and puppies after Caesarean section in the video. I would have shown the Maltese about to go under the Caesarean section. What happened to her. Did she give birth or not? Were all puppies alive? What happened next? Instead, several images of other dams and puppies after Caesarean sections were in the video."

I give free rein to the young ones to be hands on in producing the videos and that is how they learn. If I spoon-feed, they learn nothing.